emily: he's a modern-day silicon valley renegade. chamath palihapitiya is unafraid of breaking the conventional rules of engagement, vowing to take bigger risks, solve the biggest problems, and make money big-time. from putting chips in our clothes to starting a university from scratch. he is perhaps best known for supercharging facebook from 50 million to 750 million users. but tech's growth legend started on an unlikely path, in a country gripped with civil war. joining me today on "studio 1.0" the incendiary investor and

founder of the social capital partnership, chamath palihapitiya. thank you so much for joining us. how do you feel about that word "incendiary?" chamath: i love that word actually. it's like, at least people will remember you. good or bad. emily: i want to start at the beginning because your story is so fascinating. you were born in sri lanka. what was the state of the country at that time? chamath: i was born in 1976. i think the civil war broke out in the early 1980's between the tamil hindu minority and the ethnic senegalese buddhist majority. both my parents are buddhists. my dad was in the civil service. my mom was a nurse. my dad was able to insinuate himself to get posted to the sri lankan high commission in canada. i think we were six when myself, my sister, and my parents immigrated. emily: had the war started by then? chamath: it had started. my dad proudly talks about how he was a communist organizer. when he spoke out about that, there was a huge pushback.

pushback from the government that said you can't talk like this. so there was a lot of pressure on my father to the point where he could not reasonably return to sri lanka without his life or our life not being in some kind of jeopardy, so we filed for refugee status. the canadian government, out of the goodness of their heart, gave us refugee status, and then we stayed, and literally, like, life as we knew it abruptly stopped and we had to start all over again. no house, no clothes, no nothing. and fast forward, i'm sitting here with you. it's pretty -- it is crazy. it is probably not supposed to turn out this way, but it did. emily: did you go from being fairly well-off to having almost nothing? chamath: we had nothing. i grew up on welfare until the age of 18. my first job out of college, i made $55,000. and i remember i showed that to my parents because they were always -- they complained when i took this job. i took a job in finance because i saw this number.

i told them afterwards, you have to realize i remember what it was like. i know for a fact when i saw your joint tax return, the most amount of money that they had made was $32,000 combined. emily: three kids? chamath: three kids, you know, in a 2 bedroom, 400 square foot apartment, lived above a laundry mat. two bedroom apartment. and they grinded it out. you know? they did everything. they put us into good schools. they found a way to give us music lessons. how do you do that on $32,000? emily: your mother was a housekeeper, right? chamath: she was always trying to better her english to take equivalency exams to become a nurse. unfortunately, that never happened for her. but she was able to become a nurse's aide. my dad struggled to find a job, worked in a photocopy store for a while, then finally got a good job as a civil servant. the best he could do was escape a really difficult situation and try to set an example and, you know, hopefully the kids will learn and do the same thing. i think that is a lot of my

motivation to say what is on my mind. the reality is, silicon valley trades on two things, right? one is lore, and the other is success. so in terms of lore, i think i've paid my dues. i have lore. i have worked in three of, like, the top five internet businesses ever created. i did not necessarily found them, but i was at the foot of all three of them. and so i just don't care what anybody thinks anymore. what troubles do i have? i have no troubles. you know? i'm relatively healthy, knock on wood. financially secure. so why aren't i saying what i believe? my dad had nothing. he stood up and he was able to say this war shouldn't happen. emily: what is the myth of chamath palihapitiya, and what is the reality? chamath: the reality is i am a deeply insecure person who got extraordinarily lucky, more lucky than i deserved, who is trying very hard to leave a

reasonably positive legacy so that i feel like i did the right thing. i feel like there are way more people that are way more talented than me. i think the myth is that i'm aloof, i can be arrogant, i am very -- you know, i say what's on my mind. i guess at some level maybe all of those things are true. but the "me" that i know is just the same guy that feels like my parents gave up a lot. i feel like i should be really doing something important with it. emily: were you like this when you were young? has this evolved? have you become more courageous? chamath: what is that phrase -- alcohol is a great truth serum. i mean, money is a great amplifier of courage. like i said, what do i have to be afraid of at this point? i have an obligation now to do what i think is right, and to help people, and build some things that are interesting. and frankly, to make more money, because i feel like if i can make more money, i will have a

better sense of what i have to do. i spent the last two months in a long, drawn out pitched battle to figure out if we could launch a $100 breast cancer test for the united states. what i wanted to do was basically subsidize the whole thing. and it would have cost about, you know, $100, $150 million to do this right. emily: so you are saying for $150 million, you could create a $100 breast cancer test? chamath: i could bring it to market and pay for a lot of women to do it. point is, all of those things are possible only because money amplifies your ability to do this. emily: so as a kid when you did not have money -- chamath: all i wanted to do was be rich. i would obssess about the forbes list. i thought it was the most interesting and important thing in the world. no context other than i hated to be poor. it just sucks to be poor. we did not even have a car until i was 17 years old. that is what created this insecurity, i think. i remember, for two or three years, i would explicitly lie about where i lived. i think it was because i was ashamed. emily: there's a codename for you, charlie foxtrot, cf.

which also stands for crazy f'er. are you a crazy f'er? chamath: yeah. ♪ emily: how did you end up in

silicon valley? chamath: it was very accidental. when i graduated, i took this job in finance, mostly just to relieve the immediate pressure i felt on my family. very quickly, i thought it was boring. my girlfriend at the time had -- who is now my wife -- had moved down here. that is how i came down here. i applied for a bunch of jobs. and i got a job at winamp. and that's how it all started. emily: how did you get the job at facebook? chamath: i had known sean parker since the early 2000's. and basically, parker and zuck -- emily: he was president at that time? chamath: he said that he was going to be in washington, d.c. where aol's offices were. i'll be with mark zuckerberg, do you want to meet? we had a meeting and i thought this was super interesting.

these guys are up to something. and so i did a deal with facebook where we integrated aim into pages of facebook. and in that process, that's how i really got to meet zuck. emily: what was he like at that time? chamath: high potential, but still very young. emily: did you know? did you have a feeling that it was going to be huge? chamath: i don't think we knew until about 2008, mid-2008. and the reason why is that by mid-2008, we could say to ourselves, there is a formula here. and by "formula" i mean that we understood the psychology of why people wanted to be a part of this. and once you understand the psychology, then it is just a matter of building features and software that bring that psychology to life. people loved this emotional and, you know, responsiveness that facebook could give them. and so the formula was to figure out how these early behaviors could then drive the ability for

you and me to pull other people in, because we wanted more of that psychological feedback. emily: you are legendary when it comes to growing facebook. what did you do, how did you do it, and how much of it was you and how much of it was facebook? chamath: i think it was like 99.95% was facebook and 50 basis points to me. in my job, i inherited an unbelievable leader who had an unbelievable vision, and i was lucky to have a group of people who wanted to tolerate me for, you know, 4 or 5 years. emily: i know for a fact that startups today are consciously looking for their chamath. i know one startup that has a codename for you, charlie foxtrot. cf. which also stands for crazy f'er. are you a crazy f'er? chamath: yeah. [laughter] chamath: yeah. yeah. emily: tell me something you did that was crazy. chamath: when it was time to

expand internationally, the typical thing that people would do is you go and talk to google, yahoo!, ebay. how they expanded internationally. it was always the same answer. we take some lily white mba and they go out on an expat package. i was like, f- that. so, we went and hired -- we said, in brazil, only brazilians. prerequisite, they should not be able to speak english very well. we would do that in all these markets. for example, in russia, at one point we said -- we were approached -- we didn't do it. i thought about it. we didn't do this. i thought about it. you can buy a list from, like, a russian hacking group with every single person's name in russia. and for a while, i was like wow. we should just buy this list of every single person's name and we were going to run google ads so that when they search for themselves, they see links to a dark profile, not even a profile that exists but a fake profile. we didn't do it. i want to be clear.

the point is you have to be able to figure out where is that line. and kind of go a few steps past the line. emily: what are facebook's biggest challenges today? chamath: it is the challenge of any successful company, which is the internal inability to disrupt yourself. think about practically what happens in a company today. not just facebook, google, apple. extreme wealth creation. all of the distraction that creates. extreme amounts of incremental focus, attention, press, adulation. the accolades come out of every single part of the woodwork. oh, my god you are -- it takes a really, really, really special person to not be able to be affected by that. emily: google and facebook are trying to do a lot of the same things. who wins? chamath: i think they both win, but in different ways. i think what happens is that google wins with respect to the

entry point. they own the front door to the internet, and they own the front door to 90% of the mobile web. and facebook owns the experience once you're there. emily: speaking of another big company that you're not fond of, you once wrote "tim cook has created a milquetoast, say-nothing, uninspiring, margin tweaker image for himself." you also said that apple should bypass tesla and make elon musk the ceo. do you still believe that? chamath: yeah. emily: why? chamath: i think that he is very good at what he does. and i think he is probably an exceptional operationally minded ceo. it is just the question is, can that person inspire the creative types to find or build the next lily pad? my intuition on this is no. you go to a company like apple, death marching to a trillion dollar market cap. okay? think of the amount of wealth that is created in a place like that.

but then think of what that means for that individual engineer who has that next great idea. if you're trying to continue to build the next great thing, where the person at the top is not necessarily optimized for thinking that way and being as, maybe, you know, disruptive, and rather just wants to create a more holistic, communal work environment, i'm not sure greatness comes from those boundary conditions. emily: can apple only get there if they have a new leader? chamath: no, no, i think that they can acquire. tesla is a good one to me because it's a multitrillion dollar category. it is something we would all love, an apple experience in our car. there are many other areas, home automation. if apple built your house, i bet they would sell more houses than anybody in the world. emily: how much longevity does apple have? chamath: they have a lot of longevity. so really the question is should we be looking at them for the next big thing or just to behave like every other big company. if there was any way we could completely wind back the clock, and that would have happened,

that's the one thing i wish had never happened. ♪ are emily: what is the social

capital partnership? where did this idea come from? chamath: it manifests itself today as a venture fund. but i started in it with a much larger ambition and hopefully, a much more important mission than just investing and generating returns. basically what i saw in 2011, when i was leaving facebook, i saw three massive trends. the first was that everything was moving to mobile. the second was there was just a massive amount of regulatory change that we had never seen before. and then the third was that

things were getting democratized at an unbelievably rapid pace. if i had to take those three trends and apply them to markets where i thought they would be most disruptive, what would they be? those three trends in my opinion then and still today, will disproportionately affect health care, education, and financial services. and that is when the light bulb went off. i was like, wait a minute. those things matter. and then i was like, oh my gosh, this is it. we need to create a platform that over the next 20-30 years can rewrite the rules of those things in a way where we can affect outcomes for people. and i am like, that's my life mission. that will feel like i did everything i was supposed to. emily: you do have social in the name. does that change things? chamath: social comes from society. i want to -- i want to help society. i want to build things for people. emily: some people would say you have had big exits from yammer, tinder. are those world-changing, society changing companies? chamath: when we find opportunities to back incredible people that are doing their own version of things that will create value, we get behind those guys in a big way. and so, you know, things like tinder and things like yammer

allow me to do chronic heart failure, diabetes, asthma, breast cancer, copd, starting a university for kids. emily: how is social capital different from andreasen horvitz? chamath: phase one, phase two. phase one is the same bloody thing. and i think phase two is completely different. emily: what phase are you in? so you are giving people the chamath secrets without -- they do not need to hire a chamath. chamath: it is hard to find these people. and so we give it to them in a box. emily: chamath in a box. chamath: as a service. it is really growth as a service. as we become successful, our goal is to have a pool of capital to reframe how some of these broken things should work. and that is the end game. emily: a few years ago, you

called out airbnb's founders for taking money off the table and not giving other employees an opportunity. what did you take away from that? chamath: i took a lot away from that. that was really -- you know -- if there is any way where we completely could wind back the clock, that's the one thing i wish would never have happened. it was not fair to brian and the team. it wasn't fair to me. i said what i said. and i wanted them to hear what i said. and that's all i wanted. emily: do you wish you didn't say it? chamath: no, but i wish we didn't have to deal with it in the public record. emily: were bridges burned there? chamath: no bridges burned. but it's like -- well, probably, yeah. it is just a crappy thing all the way around. emily: so this is my question. you had a problem with how they were taking money off the table. is silicon valley ethical? is silicon valley loyal? chamath: i think silicon valley is deeply moral and i think it's

ethically gray. emily: what do you mean by gray? chamath: we are in an ecosystem that is very naive in that it is not 100 years old. there aren't defined ways of doing things. we are inventing things every day. and in things that are new, people are going to try a bunch of different things. and some things will work, some things won't. i don't think anyone here is acting criminally. they are deeply moral. people care to do the right thing. emily: silicon valley -- the tech community is being blamed for the rising inequality. you don't require your companies to donate 1% of their time equity and philanthropy to -- chamath: no. my companies are for-profit companies. that's not their job. their job is to educate people. to manage diabeties. emily: you are personally invested in this fund? chamath: i am personally the largest investor. emily: how much? chamath: $120 million and counting. emily: you mentioned peter thiel

encouraged you to buy into it. do you think you can beat the returns of other vc funds? or the absolute distributions? chamath: we are obliterating the market. the public side vehicle is probably 30 points of alpha above the nasdaq. the private side vehicle is roughly the same. it is really good. we are involved in a $10 billion - $15 billion unicorn companies in meaningful ways. emily: i want to know about your poker hobby. you don't just enjoy poker, you are in the world series of poker. chamath: it would be great if one day we would ever be able to film this, but there is about 20 extremely successful businessmen. we play regularly in an unbelievable game in l.a. since then, i started my own version of that here. emily: who is the best poker player in silicon valley? chamath: if i had to name, i could name a couple who i think are exceptional. david sachs, ceo of yammer, in

my home game. dave goldberg, ceo. my wife, brigette lau. she is a really, really good player. i have been on a two-year down streak. i have lost for two years straight in this game. emily: you and your wife have been together before you were very, very rich. how do you manage that transition? you have kids. chamath: we've made a decision that we are giving it all away. emily: how do you want to be remembered? chamath: i want to be a person who hopefully will say generally, you know, did what he felt was the right thing, and then lived a life that was morally true to his beliefs, and in a small way, paid off the debt to his parents. emily: chamath palihapitiya, thank you so much for joining us today on studio 1.0. chamath: thanks. ♪ betty: he is the billionaire

media mogul who calls himself the country boy from tennessee. dish network founder charlie ergen speaks out. charlie: i think we have a lot to talk about now. betty: for the first time on bloomberg television, ergen weighs in on the seismic shift taking place in television. his plans to become the next big wireless company and why he may be looking to merge with that guy, the pink t-shirt wearing t-mobile ceo john ledger. charlie: they certainly have done a fantastic job, being an upstart company, the uncarrier, so to speak. betty: but the famously tough boss faces questions about his management style. charlie: we have high expectations, and if you are not somebody who is used to high expectations, you're just not as comfortable here. betty: join me as charlie ergen dishes it all out on this